As I have said before and it bears repeating there is a statistically insignificant number of perverts who eroticise dental pain. Aside from Bill Murrays’ character in Little Shop of Horrors, you just aren’t’ gonna find many people who dig on that shit!

I’ve been going through a series of panicky moments due to an unpleasant experience yesterday where I just couldn’t get fucking numb for a critical root canal. This guy seems like a great dentist but it just wasn’t happening and I had to safeword and call the scene ask him to stop the procedure.

I value the relationships I have formed within the BDSM community. It is not only that we have the commonality of kink, it is that being a pervert means that you smite the artifice of sexual Gerrymandering.

I am living a charmed life in some ways. My lifestyle as an “Out Kinky Pervert” actually was pivotal in landing me my current job. I am out to everyone who knows me, and I am pleased about that. I have done a lifestyle mash-up with kink and theater, kink and employment, kink and my social life. This makes for awesome stories. And a pretty groovy life. Most importantly, I have made friends who, outside of BDSM, it is highly unlikely I’d ever have known.

Two friends of mine fall into this category. Lady Thendara and her husband, Mustang, are the kind of loving and happy couple you’d see at dinner, going to a movie, shopping, whatever and have no idea that, when they “got hitched”, he was actually in full pony gear, and proudly pulled his bride in a pony cart.

Well, that was the ceremony for “kink family” at least.

Grant us all the freedom to play our heart's desire.

I was the caterer for that phenomenal soirée, and it was pretty awesome to be a part of such a singular event. There is nothing that makes me smile quite like the memory of drawing up a menu that included appetizers, a carving station, beverages and…pony-treats. Think quartered apples, (but NO green ones!) and whole carrot sticks alongside people-sized crudité .

I feel so blessed to have folks in my life who are an example of a couple who have found kinky compatibility and share their joy with others. I am happy in their company whether playing Scrabble, enjoying play-time in a Dungeon, gossiping over dinner or wriggling in bondage.

I’ve played with the both of them before. Mustang is a switchy player both in and out of his Pony Headspace. And Lady Thendara has enough experience on both sides of the crop to be a double threat. Female Switches, y’all!! Much like the Wu-Tang clan, they ain’t nothing to fuck with.

I was a bit apprehensive when Thendara invited me to visit with them for the weekend, despite the fact I really wanted to. Of late I have been having some pretty radical internal conflicts about my role in BDSM. Partially this is the same shit I grind myself through whenever I’m single for a while. But playing with a couple, for me, has its own wistfulness. It can underscore my being single…here I am, alone, and there they are, all happy and blah blah blah… but mostly it was my fear of not being “enough.”

As a masochist, I can play very heavily. The operative word in that sentence being the modifier. I can, but that does not mean I will. And it doesn’t always mean I want to. Being a submissive or a slave sometimes means subsuming your will, and then you better be down to take one for the sake of your service-oriented ass.

Many people see that highly-charged over-the-top play-style and assume that is the way that I play all of the time. But it isn’t. It is just what people remember and talk about at the next Munch. My “heavy bottoming” has terms, conditions, infrastructure, caverns caves sinkholes and fucking punji-pits within. And you can’t see that. All you see is me being thrown to the ground and shocked with dog collars, poked with a few dozen needles, brutally anally assaulted, OR groveling and licking the boots of a man I’d just met.

But these are the exception, rather than the rule, and I am ill-suited, right now, for heavy play. Because I have no one to whom I can turn for the unpredictable repair process I need to “come back” from that edge. And for me to want to take that pain, I realize I need that emotional connection.

Yet I live in apprehension of the thought of disappointing my friends.

So, I scurry around the edges and hope that my Dom Charming will soon ride in in his gleaming creaking leathers and sweep me off of my quivering feet.

But I couldn’t resist the sunny warmth of my friend’s offer to play, and the instantaneous relaxing of the bands of anxiety circling my heart when I blurted out that I really can’t do any heavy play and Thendara laughed.

“We’re service tops, sweetie! It’s all good!”

Oh. Right. You WANT me to enjoy myself.

Fuck yeah.

So, right now, I have something better than obsessing and moping, and that is letting myself enjoy the company of friends, knowing that they are looking forward to seeing me, and that it is OK to say “Be gentle, care for me, and hold me after.” and they will do that, with love and affection.

The other day I was at my desk at work, grimacing over the hundreds upon hundreds of photographs of our member’s members when I decided I needed a fucking break.

I stood up and was about to push my chair back when, by the Holy Sweet trompibulating trunk of my Dear Lord Ganesha I smacked the FUCK out of my hamstring.

It hurt VERY. BADLY.

Many profanities were uttered.

My co-workers are accustomed to this sort of outburst, for various reasons. It can be something as simple as, say, watching a Member Cam Show featuring the particularly imaginative use of a big ass can of Foster’s Lager.

Look Ma! No hands!

It often is a particularly gruesome photo of a fellow pervert’s genitalia in some particularly unflattering configuration.

We get ’em all folks.

But alas, no. It wasn’t a clever rogue with a photo of his penis in a hot dog bun.

It was me, hurting myself. Again.

When I was a kid I was very clumsy. It wasn’t discovered until I started school, that this was mostly a by-product of severe Myopia and slight Astigmatism. My running into walls and falling off of curbs was curbed thereafter, but I was always a bit gangly.

Later years were plagued by similar clumsiness, but more often than not it was due to ethanol intoxication.

Been a little while since I’ve had that be a problem, and I pray every day to remain in this cleared-headed state.

But as I ruefully rubbed the insulted ankle, and did deep breathing and such in order to focus on dissipating and “processing” the pain, I though about the correlation I’ve often noticed between kinky play and self-inflicted injury.

When in a BDSM relationship, I notice the incidence of self-inflicted injury precipitously drops in the afterglow of a good hard thrashing butt whomping play-date. Have you noticed this yourself, my dear fellow Masochists? Or am I, again, the Lone Freak?

Sometimes weeks would go by then it would start again. I’d be in rehearsal, and within a 4 hour period I would poke myself with a pencil, stumble over a chair, run into a prop, drop a pig-skull on my foot*.

It got so that my non-kink-identified friends would be all “Jesus Mo. Go get your ass beaten. Really. This is ridiculous.”

And sure enough, if I did what I could to fulfil that gnawing, I’d be accident free for a stretch again.

Nowadays, I am not attached, so the play is…well.

Infrequent?

Yes.

And the bumps, she small scrapes, the nail caught on flesh that leaves welts….they do their best to remind this body that we are alive and in this body.

It doesn’t replace the crack hiss and sting of a whip thrown at the speed of sound, or a needle silent whisper through skin.

This is always my thought when I am not involved in a relationship. and time goes by, and I have a play-date.

Which I have tonight.

The vagaries of physical tolerances comes to the fore and I wonder if, perhaps, the years of regular, hard play were an illusion.

Perhaps I was fooling myself into thinking that I enjoy pain, that my body will have forgotten those truly transcendent moments, that this was all a Really Desperate Measure to get sadistic motherfuckers to pay some attention to me, for a while.